Sadly every 20 minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with blood cancer; for many their only hope is a blood stem cell transplant. And that’s why we’re here: Anthony Nolan is a unique, pioneering charity. Every day, we save the lives of people with blood cancers like leukaemia and other serious blood disorders, who urgently need a blood stem cell transplant (often known as a bone marrow transplant).

We exclusively run the UK register of donors willing to donate their healthy stem cells. There are 1,600 people in the UK right now who are in need of a lifesaving transplant but we can only find matches for around half of them. So we need to do more – we need grow our register by recruiting more young people aged between 18 and 40 and we need to educate young people about the importance of altruistic donation.

More recently we established the country's first combined charitable umbilical cord blood bank and stem cell therapy centre. We now collect and store stem cells from umbilical cords from the maternity units of five major hospitals. Last year we provided 937 people with a chance for life byproviding stem cell transplants. Sadly not every transplant is successful. Our team of scientists work hard to carry out world class research into improving transplantation outcomes for patients to improve the chances of survival for all the people receiving one. Advances in medical science mean that we are confident of saving even more lives, but we also need more support than ever.